Northwest artist John Grade has exhibited in galleries and museums as near as Bellevue Arts Museum and as far as Galerie Ateliers L’H Du Siege in France. His numerous awards include the 2010 biennial Willard Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and the 2011 Schnitzer Prize from the Portland Art Museum among others. His work has been featured and reviewed in several national publications including Sculpture, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, and on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Clarence Acox, musician, mentor and educator, has infused Seattle with the jubilation of jazz for the past forty years. A native of New Orleans, Acox came to Seattle in 1971 to revive Garfield High School’s music program. Garfield Jazz Ensemble is now the most traveled high school band in the country and has taken first place four times at New York’s Essentially Ellington National Jazz Band Competition and Festival, the country’s most prestigious high school jazz competition. Acox co-founded and serves as co-artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. He was named educator of the year by Down Beat magazine in 2001. In 2008 Seattle Metropolitan magazine named him one of the 50 most influential musicians in the history of Seattle music.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has been reporting on politics and baseball for more than two decades. Goodwin is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room.